A Coast Guard detachment in Florida is asking for tips that may help investigators track down a person making fake "mayday" calls on marine band radio and describing a military response to a nuclear attack.

The calls and threats originate off the Gulf Coast of Florida, according to a news release from Coast Guard Public Affairs Detachment Tampa Bay. The pattern of threats and false alarms has continued for some time; the release, issued Sept. 12, 2019, states that Coast Guard Sector St. Petersburg received the latest threat Aug. 13, 2019, via VHF channel 22A.

"In this call, the male caller makes threats against the Coast Guard personnel, aircraft, and vessels," officials said in the release. "The broadcast sounds like the same person who has made other radio broadcasts that start with MAYDAY three times and then talks about, 'scrambling all jets we are under nuclear attack.'"

The bad guys and their improvised explosive devices couldn't hide from Marine Sgt. Yeager, a Purple Heart veteran of three tours in Afghanistan.

His specialty was route clearance, and he was credited with sniffing out dozens of roadside bombs in more than 100 combat patrols for his Marine buddies.

On April 12, 2012, Yeager and his handler, Lance Cpl. Abraham Tarwoe, were hit by one of those roadside bombs while on patrol in southwestern Helmand province with a unit from the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment.

Tarwoe, originally from Liberia, perished in the blast and Yeager was hit with shrapnel and lost part of an ear.

The U.S. Air Force no longer wants to kick the can down the road on aging aircraft that may not be suitable for a fight against a near-peer adversary such as China or Russia.

More resources should be spent on state-of-the-art programs instead of sustaining old weapons and aircraft, multiple service officials said Sep 4, 2019, during the 2019 Defense News Conference.

"We have to divest some of the old to get to the new," Lt. Gen. Timothy Fay, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, told audiences during a panel on Air Force program prioritization.

Sig Sauer Inc. on Sep. 3, 2019, offered a first look at the automatic rifle and rifle prototypes for the U.S. Army's Next Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) effort, after the service selected the company to advance to the next phase of testing for the 6.8mm weapon system.

Sig Sauer, maker of the Army's new Modular Handgun System, was selected recently along with General Dynamics-OTS Inc. and AAI Corporation Textron Systems to deliver prototypes of both the automatic rifle and rifle versions of the NGSW, as well as hundreds of thousands of rounds of special 6.8mm ammunition common to both weapons, to Army testers over the next 27 months.

The service plans to select a final design for both weapons from a single company in the first quarter of 2022 and begin replacing M4A1 carbines and M249 squad automatic weapons in an infantry brigade combat team in the first quarter of 2023, Army modernization officials have said.

The Navy recently approved low-rate initial production (LRIP) for a special, underwater drone system designed to conduct counter-mine operations for the service's littoral combat ship.

Program Executive Officer for Unmanned and Small Combatants recently granted Milestone C approval to the Knifefish Surface Mine Countermeasure Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Program, according to a news release from Naval Sea Systems Command.

The Navy is expected to award an LRIP contract to Knifefish prime contractor General Dynamics Mission Systems, the release states.

The Knifefish system is designed to deploy from an LCS as well as from other offshore vessels to detect and classify "buried, bottom and volume mines" in highly cluttered environments, according to the release.

Julia Yllescas was just seven years old when her father, Army Capt. Robert Yllescas, succumbed to injuries sustained in an improvised explosive device blast in Afghanistan in 2008, according to the Omaha World Herald. Now a high school senior, Julia honored her father's memory by taking "angel photos" for her senior portrait, as reported by the KOLN TV station in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Susanne Beckman, owner of Snapshots by Suz, created the photos as a special gift for the family, she said on Facebook.

Marines in the Pacific carried out the first-ever, at-sea F-35B "hot reloads" in that theater, allowing the aircraft to drop back-to-back 1,000-pound bombs on a target in the middle of the Solomon Sea.

Marines from the amphibious assault ship Wasp went to war last week with the "killer tomato," a big red inflatable target that was floating off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The Joint Strike Fighter jets left the ship armed with the 1,000-pound GBU-32 Joint Direct Attack Munition and a 500-pound GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb.

Once they dropped the bombs on the target, they returned to the Wasp where they reloaded, refueled and flew back out to hit the floating red blob again. It was the first-ever shipboard hot reloads in the Indo-Pacific region, according to a Marine Corps news release announcing the milestone.